Our friend Gene Edward Veith at Cranach blog links to a post where the blogger wonders why, if many young people are being attracted to liturgical churches, as has been widely reported, they aren’t streaming to Lutheran churches.
Our friend Anthony Sacramone, at Strange Herring, provides an answer: Lutherans are boring:
Growing up, all the Lutherans I knew were boring. They minded their ps and qs and paid their taxes on time (begrudgingly—I was LCMS, after all) and kept their heads down and their feet on the ground. They were good citizens and thought things through and were practical, rarely all that imaginative (although every once in a while a teacher would try and shake things up, only to be brought to heel if no great measurable results were forthcoming). There were exceptions, of course. (An elementary school teacher pretty much drank himself to death.) But they were notable for being exceptions.
I would rise to the spirited defense of my Lutheran brethren (and Anthony is a Lutheran, by the way), but I think I need a nap.
Well, young people want excellence, don’t they? Lutherans are quick to say their church is just as good as any other, right?
I could be wrong. What do I know?
Of potential relevance, I know the Anglicans have started mission work in my city and have one of the coolest churches in town. They have already outgrown their location and want to plant new churches instead of build large ones.
http://journeytoorthodoxy.com/2014/01/24/why-people-convert-to-orthodoxy/
Lutheran…. Brethren…? don’t start….
Just teasin’….
one way to pose the question: is Lutheranism forever?
as this blgger put it:
” Littlejohn attributes Protestantism’s fractured state to people not taking sola fide seriously enough. In another blog posting I offered a different explanation – that the root cause of Protestantism’s fractured state lies in sola scriptura. See: “Protestantism’s Fatal Genetic Flaw.” And in another blog posting I argued that Bible does not teach sola scriptura and that what it really teaches is the traditioning process. See: “If Not Sola Scriptura, Then What? The Biblical Basis for Holy Tradition.”
Martin Luther has influenced the church for 500 years. He will continue to do so, even if Lutheranism under goes another reformation. I won’t be surprised if we start talking about Neo-Lutheranism in another few decades. Maybe liberal Anglicans will provoke it.
If I remember my Lutheran Church History correctly, at one point in the 1800’s there were over 145 Lutheran denominations in the United States. Much of that was due to the fractured nature of immigration and the difficulty of traveling great distances prior to the expansion of railroads. Thus, there were Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, German, Finnish and other ethnic groups who each started new churches in the localities where they settled, be it Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Ohio, Iowa or Georgia with often different branches representing pietistic, state church, high church, low church, conservative, liberal and other variations in theology and practice within each ethnic variation. This was repeated by various waves of immigration so that the German immigrants of the 1840’s started a new denomination rather than joining the denomination started by the German immigrants in the 1600 who had settled farther east. Multiply this by all the other protestant denominations. Merge a few, split a few. See how we got where we are today.